Tuesday, July 20, 2010

There are a gazillion insect stories in the naked city; this is one...

Long, long ago…. I got rid of the tomatoes, and planted my community garden plot with milkweeds and goldenrods. I had decided to feed not myself, but the BEETLES. I especially hoped to attract two cerambycids: locust borers (Megacyllene robiniae), which mate on goldenrod but lay their eggs on locusts,and milkweed beetles (Tetraopes tetrophthalmus), which feed on--you guessed it--milkweeds.

During the next year or two, I actually saw the occasional locust borer. But the milkweed took over within a few years, and while it attracted a number of other milkweed feeders, I had pretty much lost all hope of attracting Tetraopes tetrophthalmus... until just last week, 15 YEARS LATER, when one individual arrived!

6 comments:

Whenever I hope to attract cerambycids I splash on some cologne and wear tight pants but planting milkweed is also effective.These beetles and your photographs of them are beautiful. Thank you for magnifying a world I would normally have never noticed.BTW, my favorite beetle is Popillia japonica, commonly known as the Japanese beetle with an amazing iridescent copper-colored elytra and green thorax and head. They are clumsy fliers and easy to catch, I used to admire them in jars as a child. X Paulo

Dear Amy,Congratulations, I really like the design and color of your blog. I do not like bugs as you well know. Please come to my apartment at once with your net and arsenic as I have another waterbug running amok in my apartment.Your friend and neighbor,David

Once I tried to attract cerambycids in Peru by baiting traps with vanillin, the chemical that gives vanilla its aroma. My baggy field clothes ended up reeking of vanilla (better, I guess, than sweat). When I walked through the forest I found myself dive-bombed NOT by cerambycids, but by big euglossine orchid bees! The males collect aromatic compounds as part of their lek-forming habit.

Beetles have a reputation of being clumsy fliers. Many of them are not clumsy at all, but scarabs (the family including the Japanese beetle) definitely are. At dusk in the tropical rain forest, huge dung beetles (also scarabs) sometimes collide with me; they plummet to the ground, take back to flight, and do the same thing all over again!

I'm afraid that we have to credit the template makers for the improved aesthetics of blog #2. Sorry, you know my time-tested water bug strategy-- trap under a pan and wait. Jack and Pipsqueak had the great thrill of chasing a house centipede the other day... but being boy cats it was all play! The females, as you undoubtedly know, go in for the kill.